Our family recently joined the annual caravan, de rigueur for millions of American families, of College Tours. Our first stop, a public university, offered a high-voltage PowerPoint talk and a lunch voucher. Our second, a private university with annual tuition and fees exceeding $50,000, stressed the add-ons.

"If you live in the dorm," our guide gushed, "you just call maintenance when a light bulb burns out -- they send someone to your child's room and replace it immediately."

I want my children to learn self-reliance; the indulgence seemed extreme. That is, until I read Jeffrey Selingo's meticulously researched "College (Un)Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students."

The competition to attract students through an ever-expanding list of amenities is only a part of the problem that Selingo diagnoses (dry cleaning drop-off and concierge services are a couple ofexamples). Overall, college students today are studying less (but are more likely to get A's anyway), more indebted, and less likely to graduate with degrees that helpthem find jobs.

As Selingo asserts, "Whenever we talk about the education system in the United States, we seem to talk about the failures of K-12 education and the successes of higher education. Sure, we complain about how much college costs, but we have largely adopted the belief that American colleges and universities are the best in the world."

But, he concludes, "look underneath the facade that has been built in the last decade by adding more degree programs, more law and medical schools, and more research capacity, and you will begin to see a more sordid reality."

Selingo is a savvy informant. Editor-at-large for the Chronicle of Higher Education, he knows the data. He's not marketing anything, except for a wariness of slick collegiate marketing. And he's certainly not a philistine; he merely wants to reposition learning at the heart of . . . well, learning.

"In framing the debate about college in purely economic terms, we ignore the value of college as the place where students transform themselves -- by meeting others with different backgrounds and beliefs, by exploring new subjects, and by making mistakes and learning from them, all with the end result that the student leaves the institution with an education, not just a job."

Selingo's argument is particularized in Steven Harper's analysis of legal education and practice, "The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis." To Harper, "The picture isn't pretty: students with false expectations, deans with an overwhelming incentive to tell students what they want to hear, and few people with any reason to offer an effective counternarrative. It's not surprising that there have been so many more law students than jobs, and so many unhappy lawyers."

Basic Books, 251 pp., $26.99

The problems with legal education and practice are the subject of much warranted hand-wringing. Next year, 70,000 students will apply for 50,000 law school openings; of those accepted, only half will find jobs requiring a legal degree.

When students graduate, they're shackled to debt: "Although students graduating from public law schools have lower average debt than their private law school counterparts, both numbers for the class of 2011 were daunting: $75,700 (public) versus $125,000 (private)."

And if they are among the few landing jobs at big law firms, they are often profoundly dissatisfied -- the effects of compensation inequity, brutal work demands, and the tyranny of billable hours quickly take their toll: "Just two years after graduation, almost 60 percent of those new big-firm lawyers from top-ten schools said they expected to leave their jobs within the next two years.".

It's no wonder, then, that "lawyers suffer from disproportionately high rates of depression, alcoholism, and substance abuse," and that "six out of ten attorneys who have been practicing for ten years or more say they advise young people to avoid law school."

Harper offers sound remedies, and any current or aspiring attorney should read the book. But Selingo offers more practical tools, at least to the average consumer -- which is everyone heading to college (not just law students), and their parents.

In a helpful "Checklist for the Future," he advises prospective students to ask tough questions. Is the college financially healthy? What, precisely, does the financial aid package include? What are the school's graduation rates, and job placement rates in the student's field of study?

And he concludes with a catalog of 18 "Colleges of the Future"-- institutions that are evolving to face new challenges, such as Cornell University, which now has a deep commitment to student research and community engagement.

Every family with school-age children is familiar with the annual Summer Reading List. Parents should put "College (Un)Bound" at the top of their lists -- and add, as indicated, Harper's book as well. They are indispensable guidebooks to a rocky and shifting terrain.

Follow Us

cleveland.com is powered by Plain Dealer Publishing Co. and Northeast Ohio Media Group. All rights reserved (About Us).The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Northeast Ohio Media Group LLC.